Opinions and musings on religion, philosophy, science, politics, and life from a conservative Catholic neurosurgeon.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Jerry Coyne collaborates with Holocaust deniers

Ohio billboard put up by the Freedom From Religion Foundation,
which now demands the removal of the Star of David
from the Ohio Holocaust museum.

Atheist Jerry Coyne has called in the Freedom From Religion Foundation in his personal crusade against a Christian astronomy professor at Ball State University who teaches a course on the philosophical implications of modern science.

The Freedom from Religion Foundation is a militant anti-religious hate group that specializes in dragging Christians into court in order to silence them.

The FFRF now demands that the State of Ohio remove Stars of David from its planned Holocaust memorial.

The Star of David is a symbol of enormous historical and spiritual salience for Jews. It is supremely relevant to the Holocaust-- a religious symbol cherished by the Jewish people under oppression and a patch that Nazis required Jews to wear.

To ban the Star of David from a Holocaust memorial is to deny a very real part-- in many ways the core-- of the Holocaust.

The term "Holocaust denial" should be used cautiously, but the FFRF's demand that the Star of David be banned from a Holocaust museum is clearly a form of Holocaust denial. A demand that the government remove the Star of David is a demand that an important part of the truth about the Holocaust be concealed. That is genuine Holocaust denial-- not the denial that the Holocaust occurred, of course, but the denial of an essential symbol of the Jewish experience of the Holocaust.

Jerry Coyne is now collaborating with an organization that is actively engaged in Holocaust denial.

No surprise there. It is important for the haters of religion like Coyne to deny the anti-religious factors at work in genocidal anti-Semitism, just as he denies his own barely-disguised hatred of Christians.

Coyne recently compared people who support academic freedom and college courses that examine the philosophy of science from perspectives that include theism with Holocaust deniers:

"Holocaust denial is the act of denying the genocide of Jews in the Holocaust during World War II. The key claims of Holocaust denial are that the German Nazi government had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews, Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas chambers to mass murder Jews, and the actual number of Jews killed was significantly (typically an order of magnitude) lower than the historically accepted figure of 5 to 6 million."

Holocaust denial is the denial of an aspect of the historical truth about the Holocaust. It may be total denial ("the Holocaust never happened") or partial denial ("the Star of David had no salience in the Holocaust").

There are different degrees of severity in Holocaust denial.

My question, for the third time:

Do you deny that the demand to ban the Star of David from a Holocaust museum is a demand to conceal an aspect of the historical truth about the Holocaust?

I've already answered your question in my previous comment, but I can repeat for the stupid: I deny that the actions of FFRF amount to Holocaust denial. They fit neither the commonly accepted definition of Holocaust denial, nor your watered-down version.

The statement "the Star of David had no salience in the Holocaust" is your own invention, not a quote from FFRF.

LOL, doc, your attempts at obfuscation fail miserably. The FFRF objects to the display of the star of David not because they deny its relevance to the Holocaust but because they view it as a "constitutionally problematic endorsement of religion."

I do not agree with the FFRF argument and think that it's perfectly fine for a museum of Holocaust to have a religious symbol incorporated within it. But you are clearly mischaracterizing their argumentation and I am calling you out on that.

It is a denial of history. Like refusing to include a reference to the railroad tracks entering Auschwitz. Like removing the Spanish Mission Church cross from a government seal in California. You in favor of that denial of history as well, PROFESSOR?

Here's my take:The final solution was designed to eradicate the Jews of Europe. It was a clinical, racially driven concept and the Jews were the primary target. That is not to say there were not targets of opportunity. There were MILLIONS of them, actually. The machinery of the holocaust was built FOR the 'Jewish Problem' via the Wannsee conference. The yellow star was symbolic of this 'effort' at mass murder. To remove it is quite simply historical revisionism. So, that said, if the 'Freedom From Religion' (note the name) people actually gave a single damn about the other groups involved why not petition to have a monument that speaks to that? Erected to the other victims of the Nazi death machine? I know that being 'inclusive' is their PR argument, but it is clearly NOT the real meaning of a group dedicated to erasing religious symbolism with a utopian zeal. Surely, no sane individual takes seriously an argument that Judaism is being promoted as some sort of federal temple? I also must note the reference to the 'disabled' and 'mentally challenged' people killed. These people were victims of a EUTHANASIA program performed in clinics, not in the 'great burning'. A program pushed by eugenicists, whose modern day counterparts push to have the same people left to die in hospital wards, or killed before birth when 'screened'. You know? The 'population control' crowd that like to talk about 'sustainability' and 'quality of life'? I wonder if any of the FFRF people are pro human euthanasia? Pro 'choice'?

How do you equate the symbolism of the yellow star (infamous) on a holocaust memorial with the 'promotion' of a single religion? The memorial does not suggest conversion to Judaism, it simply noted the Jews were the primary target of the machinery of the holocaust. They were. Also, you may want to consider the Nazis saw the Jews in racial terms. Their method was clinical and their justification was pseudo scientific; it was not a religious war. They were not given the opportunity to convert. A drop of Jewish blood was enough to have you STERILIZED and your marriage dissolved. The star was a symbol of that 'racial impurity'.

The Holocaust had other victims besides Jews. There were about 11 million of them, of whom 6 million were Jews. The others included the Romani (gypsies), homosexuals, pacifists (such as Jehovah's Witnesses), Polish intellectuals, Slavs - anyone the Nazis considered inferior and not worthy of living.

Ignoring the non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust is as bad as Stalin's refusal to acknowledge its Jewish victims after Soviet troops captured Auschwitz in January, 1945.

If the Holocaust Memorial included symbols of non-Jewish victims would you be happy? How about it including a 'Hammer and Sickle' to reflect the fact that the Nazis also included Russian and Ukrainian Slavs in their list of the inferior to be disposed of, including the millions of Soviet POWs captured in 1941 with no planning to feed them? And the plans to reduce the population of the Soviet Union, when defeated, by 20 to 30 million through starvation (including the 3 million in Leningrad, which was going to be eradicated)?

backfire, you are an idiot. Yes, there were other victims. But the wholesale murder of human beings was designed specifically to implement the Final Solution; i.e., the extermination of Jews from the planet. To wit, via Wiki:

[I]t was only with the decision to eradicate the entire Jewish population that the extermination camps were built and industrialized mass slaughter of Jews began in earnest.

That is why a Star of David and the Holocaust (which in fact is more correctly known as HaShoah, "the catastrophe") are inseparable.

Morally speaking, the Soviets were not much better, if any better at all, than the Nazis. General Georgy Zhukov is famous for using infantrymen to clear minefields. The Soviets, and socialists in general, have been murderers on a colossal scale.

So I'm thinking you need a good head soak with the comrades down at the People's Collective Aquatic Center. Then you can have a meeting of the carbon collective, review yourselves with an air of righteous indignation, admire some Soviet propaganda art, and mourn the dissolution of the Worker's Paradise.

You should get out of your bathtub and stop playing with your toy plastic battleships. It's water logging your brain. If it had been a Shoah memorial, just a Star of David would have been reasonable.

Anyway, the Soviets won the war for the western allies. If it wasn't for the enormous casualties they incurred, the Germans would have been able to have had more troops to oppose the Normandy landings.

The western democracies were unwilling to incur large numbers of casualties. That's what makes democracies worth living in.

If any of you have not researched the Wannsee conference, here is an excellent introduction. This is an excellent if disturbing film version of the minutes of that conference called 'Conspiracy'. Free to watch on Youtube

Every sentence on this site makes me cringe. Not only are you just as offensive as the examples of atheists you bring up, you have no reasoning. I also believe you have a kinky thing for someone named Coyne, you seem obsessed with him and atheists. Who gave this conservative a computer?

"The Christian idea of the world is that it originated in a very complicated process of evolution but that it nevertheless still comes in its depths from the Logos. It thus bears reason in itself."

Benedict XVI

"The universe is not the product of darkness and unreason; it comes from intelligence, freedom, and from the beauty that is identical with love"

Benedict XVI

"We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God."

Benedict XVI

"Atheism is a disease of the soul before it becomes an error of understanding."

Plato

"Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind that it never had many professors"

Isaac Newton

"I'm not an atheist, and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God."Albert Einstein

"Egnorance: The Egotistical Combination of Ignorance and Arrogance" Burt Humburg

"Egnor [is] an interesting example of the religious pathology that's going to be afflicting us for probably the next century..." P.Z. Myers

"...so far Dr.Egnor seems not to grasp the folly of his situation." Steven Novella

"Michael Egnor is giving every sign of continuing the shenanigans that has already made him infamous in skeptical circles." Steven Novella

"Dr. Egnor has his own blog now. Hilarity ensues..."Orac

"Egnor probably always was an arrogant asshole, also when he was an athiest. Then he had a midlife crisis, found religion and he became an even bigger asshole."

Troy

"...it is simply impossible for me to continue to believe that the "Michael Egnor" articles are being written by a real person who really believes what he (or she) writes." Mike Dunford

"Michael Egnor comes back for another helping of whup ass..." P.Z. Myers

"Dr. Egnor's deviously clever plan to destroy Darwinism once and for all..." Orac

"Dr. Egnor regularly laid down flaming swaths of stupid ..." Orac

"...Dr. Egnor reaches a new low..." Mark C. Chu-Carroll

"Egnor's machine is uninhabited by any ghost..." P.Z. MyersSuddenly [Egnor] knows law better than lawyers, he knows biology better than biologists, he pretends to know everything better than people who have actually studied whatever it is that Egnor feels threatens his crazy religion. Troy

"This is not an excuse for Dr. Egnor's ignorance – he threw his hat into the ring, he deserves what he gets. He should have had the proper humility to stay out..."Steven Novella

"...that paragon of arrogant ignorance, Dr. Michael Egnor, is back at it again..." Mark C. Chu-Carroll

"...Michael Egnor just can't get enough of making himself look like an idiot..." Mark C. Chu-Carroll

"Dr. Michael Egnor: Neurosurgeon, Stony Brook Faculty, and all around Dishonest Twit...based on the level of intellectual integrity that he just demonstrated, he's not someone I would trust to train a dog, much less a doctor" Mike Dunford

"Two Things that Don't Go Together: Michael Egnor and Intellectual Integrity...Someone once pointed out that when a dog pisses on a fire hydrant, it's not committing an act of vandalism. It's just being a dog..." Mike Dunford